Small though the influence of a VP pick usually is, Trump has several ways to turn the right choice into a winning hand.
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An Establishment Unhinged
Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words—xenophobe, racist, bigot—have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Trump was being called a fascist demagogue and compared to...
The Limits of Compassion
Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...
Protect Kids or Confiscate Guns?
In days gone by, a massacre of students like the atrocity at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would have brought us together. But like so many atrocities before it, this mass murder is tearing us apart. The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite....
Booklog: Liberal Books
I have started work on a piece analyzing the rights and wrongs of the classical liberal tradition. To do it properly, I am going to review a number of major works in that tradition, specifically, Mandeville, Condorcet, Smith, Godwin, JS Mill, Fitzjames Stephen, and Hayek. I do not intend to spend a great deal...
Corrupt-a-Homa: Judicial Abuse in the Heartland
Thanks to Britney Spears’ court battles over her hard-earned fortune, more Americans than ever before are learning about how predatory lawyers, judges, doctors, conservators and guardians collaborate to defraud and destroy the lives of innocent victims. The 39-year-old Spears went public last week with her 13-year-long struggle against her father and court-appointed guardian Jamie Spears—who...
Nixon—Before Watergate
It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...
Lieutenant Ramsey’s War
Ed Ramsey never aspired to be a hero. He was only 12 years old when his father committed suicide. He was a natural-born hell-raiser; bootleg whiskey and fighting were his passions. His mother thought the Oklahoma Military Academy might salvage him. He loved horses and all things martial. The academy had both. Ramsey thrived at...
The Arty Life
Frances Spalding: Vanessa Bell; Ticknor & Fields; New York. Karen Monson: Alma Mahler: Muse to Genius: From Fin-de-Siecles Vienna to Hollywood’s Heyday; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. Women are in many ways the bearers and keepers of culture. However excluded they may have been from be coming artists in their own right, women throughout history have shown a...
Will Mideast Allies Drag Us Into War?
The New Year’s execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation. Its first purpose: Signal the new ruthlessness and resolve of the Saudi monarchy where the power behind the throne is the octogenarian King Salman’s son, the 30-year-old Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. Second, crystallize, widen and...
Now the Left is Quick to Convict
We can’t seem to have a news event (and everything that happens in our capital city is a capital-E event these days) without the searing cry in the background, drowning out all other discourse: “Impeach! Impeach!” You might call it an echo of the old exhortation, “Hey, somebody get a rope!” One thing must be...
An Interwar Odyssey
In 2011, Patrick Leigh Fermor became Patrick Leigh Former, and hundreds of thousands of devotees were doubly bereft. The first loss was the man himself, at 96 an antique in his own right, one of the last links to what feels increasingly like an antediluvian Europe, in which advanced civilization could coexist with medieval color...
A Number of Requests
Our “Letters From Prison“ (Correspondence, May 1992) elicited a number of requests for an update. The letter ended with “Frank,” a 26-year-old black man imprisoned in Illinois, in solitary confinement at a medium-security prison. He had been placed in isolation for his own protection, because the gang he had once belonged to, the Black Gangster...
The Color of Crime
The execution-style murder of three African-American college students in Newark, N.J., forced to kneel and shot in the head—allegedly by an illegal alien from Peru who was out on bail for the serial rape of a 5-year-old—has the makings of a Willie Horton issue in 2008. Newark, like New York, is a “sanctuary city,” where...
Getting Here From There
If you can remember the 1960’s, the old line goes, you weren’t really there. “There,” of course, means the counterculture represented by Woodstock, hallucinogenic drugs, antiwar protests, and Haight-Ashbury. “The 60’s” didn’t actually begin in 1960, but by the “Summer of Love” in 1967 they had clearly arrived. The Beatles eventually became counterculture icons while...
By Their Fruits
Is a lone wolf any less a wolf because he is alone? An eight-year-old boy could answer that question correctly, but many adults apparently cannot. Here in Rockford, Illinois, on December 3, just as the “holiday shopping season” was in full swing, Derrick (a.k.a. “Talib Abu Salam Ibn”) Shareef was arrested by the FBI in...
The Flat Tax
When the new guru of the Grand Old Party waddled up to the Speaker’s chair and took his oath, the clock began ticking. The GOP had 100 days to fulfill a good measure of its “Contract with America.” Since House Speaker Gingrich has been planning his takeover of Congress for more than two decades, just...
That Wedding
“She’s such an inspiration. She’s class.” That’s how 17-year-old Bianca, in her gold-lamé miniskirt, summed up Kate Middleton, 90 minutes before the British royal wedding. Like many others, Bianca was positioned alongside the Mall in central London, but unlike most she had the advantage of a view. She was being carried on the shoulders of...
King of Pop’s Trial
The Michael Jackson trial is underway, and the media is licking its chops each day in anticipation of all of the lurid details that will continue to surface over the next several months. Jackson, who is 46, has been charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy who was, at the time of the alleged incidents, a...
Restoring Island Park
The great Yellowstone caldera, home to Old Faithful and Mammoth Hot Springs, last exploded some 600,000 years ago. With a power more than one thousand times greater than Mt. St. Helen’s, it threw boulders the size of Greyhound buses nearly to Kansas. Pressure is building up again. The Yellowstone caldera is bulging in preparation for...
Is Bernie’s Hour of Power at Hand?
Can a septuagenarian socialist who just survived a heart attack and would be 80 years old in his first year in office be elected president of the United States? It’s hard to believe but not impossible. As of today, Bernie Sanders looks like one of the better, if not best, bets for the nomination. Polls...
Daddies and the Swedish State
The Mercy Killing of Socialism, launched so hopefully throughout Central and Eastern Europe in 1991, has failed. Most visibly, Polish voters returned the communists to parliamentary control in 1993, while Russia swung toward a version of National Socialism. Even in the smaller but symbolically important nation of Sweden, the “conservative revolt” sparked by right-wing election...
Importing Prosperity
When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...
The Death of Reason in the Land of Make Believe
In the driveway sits my nine-year-old Honda Civic, which I purchased two years ago after a deer demolished my Accord. Fingerprints of my grandchildren dot the rear interior window, the carpeting and seats are screaming for a vacuum, a large, reddish dent mars the paneling above the rear tire on the passenger side, and the...
Are the Bells Tolling for Amy, Liz, and Joe?
By the end of February, the race for the Democratic nomination may have come down to a choice of one of three white men. Two are well into their 70s, and either would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. The third is a 38-year-old gay in a same-sex marriage who would be our youngest president...
Gonna Take a Dysfunctional Journey
Monday, 9: 30 A.M.—Arose after an evening of drinking, soft-shell Jazz and mainstream crabs: oops—dyslexia margarita. My sister’s cleaning lady arrives with an armload of Tito Puente records and an Electrolux without a muffler: I decide to skip coffee and head right to the train station: looking forward to a leisurely trip back to Boston...
Bundy: Not Quite A Terrorist
The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land. Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos...
The Italian Counterrevolutions of 1799
Who says that conservative historians have to be old, hoary-headed men unable to produce anything innovative? A young Italian scholar named Massimo Viglione is proving the contrary with his two latest books, Rivolte dimenticate (Forgotten Revolts) and Le Insorgenze—Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Italia, 1792-1815 (Uprisings-Revolution and Counterrevolution in Italy). Viglione is a Catholic researcher in...
THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH: July 2007
PERSPECTIVE Ted's Timor Mortis by Thomas Fleming Stumbling past the half-truths. VIEWS Americans Don't Die! by Roger D. McGrath Casualties, from republic to empire. Portraits by George Garrett Some notes on the poetry of growing old. The Last Adieu by George McCartney A wake for the living. A Dirge for ...
The Unnatural Aristocracy
A little-remembered provision of the U.S. Constitution: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States” (Article I, Section 9). By this proviso the Founding Fathers affirmed the republican principle that nobody is entitled to power merely because of who he is. Americans wanted to repudiate the hereditary privilege of the Old World...
One Nation, Under Which God?
On May 5, President Joe Biden left out the word “God” in his proclamation on the annual National Day of Prayer. Some critics on the right claimed Biden was the first president in American history to do so. Of course, those detractors fail to mention that the National Day of Prayer commemoration only dates back...
Letter from Spain: Post-Election Imbroglio
This year my winter retreat in Gran Canaria coincides with an unprecedented political crisis in Spain which may herald some trouble for the Brussels-based superstate. More than a month has passed since the inconclusive general election on December 20. It has marked the end of the decades-long duopoly enjoyed by the center-right People’s Party (Partido...
In Darkest London, Part 2
This is the second part of a two-part article written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatsoever, is of strictly average intelligence, and represents no interest group or political movement. It derives solely from a recent visit to London, in which nothing spectacularly horrible occurred, and...
HOW THE WEST WAS LOST—February 2008
HARD RIGHT The Suicide of the West by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Everlasting Frontier by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Wilderness democracy. The Curious Career of Billy the Kid by Gregory McNamee The man behind the myth. Westerns by Roger D. McGrath America’s Homeric era on the silver screen. The Death of the Western by Clay Reynolds Back-trailing for affirmation. REVIEWS He ...
In the National News
Rockford doesn’t often make the national news, but when it does, you can be certain it’s not because of any good that’s happening here. Our latest brush with fame came on the last day of September, when a 32-year-old Catholic priest from a parish just south of Rockford rammed his car into the local abortuary....
On Gabriel Garcia Moreno
William Mills was right about so much in his account of Ecuador (“Down Ecuador Way,” Part I and II, December 1996 and January 1997) that it is unfortunate that his only reference to Gabriel Garcia Moreno was a passing one having to do with this “ruler of the country during part of the 19th century”...
Blindsided by Education’s Leftists
Michael Moore, the leftist director of Fahrenheit 9/11, got one thing right when he proclaimed at a June 24 press conference that, despite the Republican control of the White House and Congress, America is liberal. It is a fact. The Republican Party, the only home conservatives have at election time, does not remotely resemble the...
The War Within the War
With the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, as announced to the world by President Barack Obama, we can all sit back and smile, right? Not too big a smile, if you please. The war in nearby Afghanistan goes on, no path to victory yet discernible save the path of patience. Meanwhile the...
Conservative Origins
The year was 1964. I was 13 years old. Sitting in the family room of my parents’ home in Yorktown Heights, New York, with the TV on, I picked up the envelope that had arrived in the mail that day. I had sent away for information to all sorts of political parties and organizations in...
Polemics & Exchanges
On Weapons of Despair by Brian Murray In his February review of Kosta Tsipis’s Arsenal and Freeman Dyson’s Weapons and Hope, Professor William Hawkins rightly reminds us that both geopolitical rubes and hard-core leftists are well represented in the “no nukes” movement that has in recent years received considerable, not unfavorable, attention in the Western...
Charity v. Welfare
Before our prudent webmaster carried out our long ago agreed upon plan to disable comments on this section, I received an insightful message from W.C. Taquiya. Old friends and some regular commenters are being invited to contribute to this section, and, in the future, if I wish to stimulate debate it will be in...
HOPE
As the century ends, the marginality of poetry grows. Today it is either a ceremony in the catacombs, a ritual in the urban desert, a fiesta in the basement, or a revelation in the supermarket. It’s true that poets are still persecuted in totalitarian countries and in old-fashioned military tyrannies; in democratic nations they are...
Tribalism Marches On!
Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play. Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991. “Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?” was my title, and the column began: “In turning a...
God’s Fool
Auberon Waugh’s finely sharpened pen cuts through the mist of illusions that prevent Americans from seeing Britain as it is. In these articles from the Spectator, he exposes a society nearly gone mad. Royalty and commoner, young and old, liberal and conservative are routed by Waugh’s scathing satire. He writes of the follies of socialism...
The Middle American Struggle
Earlier this year my 12-year-old son and I had a knock-down-drag-out fight over patriotism and the evils of media influence. What incident set off these family fireworks? Was it the current U.N. wars or the influx of foreign goods? Was it Dan Rather or MTV? No, it was something much more important. My son, who...
The Big Dusty
A friend says her secret wish is for some very old distant relative, who she’s never met and won’t miss, to die and leave her a fortune. Waiting for rain this summer is a lot like that—only less realistic. In what threatens to be our third virtually rainless summer, I watch the ten o’clock news...
A Huge and Healthy Pessimism
In his splendidly sardonic Devil’s Dictionary, that old gringo Ambrose Bierce defines pessimism as “a philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.” Bierce would have smiled—or, rather, frowned—kindly upon John Derbyshire’s new book, an often droll demolition of the...
The Danger of PICS—Politically Incorrect Cartoons
Stereotypes to the right of them, stereotypes to the left of them, the politically correct volley and thunder at every image that might offend the sensitive soul of the approved victim. Dartmouth’s comic Indian mascot turned into an unsmiling noble savage, then was abolished altogether. First the Frito Bandito’s politically unacceptable gold tooth disappeared, then...
On the Other War
While Ted Galen Carpenter makes some valid points about the situation today in Afghanistan (“America’s Other War,” News, August), his attempt to blame everything on an alleged shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq is nonsense. This is an old, tired charge made mainly by antiwar Democrats in the last election but abandoned when it...
The Supreme Court v. the American Dream—March 2006
PERSPECTIVE The Royal Prerogativeby Thomas FlemingIndispensable means. VIEWS Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?by Stephen B. PresserLife, liberty, and takings. Latter-Day Beggarsby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A lesson in apocalyptic economics from the City on Seven Hills. Unjust Compensationby Scott P. RichertWhat’s not to love? NEWS Property Rights Redefinedby Steven GreenhutA new kind of blight. REVIEWS...